Max Verstappen accepts that he shouldn’t “expect miracles overnight” after he endured a frustrating lack of pace and issues with his car in Free Practice ahead of the Japanese Grand Prix.
Red Bull have so far been unable to optimise their challenger in the opening rounds of the season, with both Verstappen and team mate Isack Hadjar struggling with handling and reliability.
Their poor start has left them on just 12 points so far after Hadjar retired in Australia while running in P5, before the Dutchman’s race in China was halted due to ERS [Energy Recovery System] cooling issues.
Verstappen has not shied away from expressing his vexation at their deficit to the frontrunners, and despite bringing some upgrades to the Suzuka Circuit, including slimmer sidepods, the Milton Keynes outfit continued to face obstacles throughout FP1 and FP2.
Reflecting on the day, he later said: “Not very good, to be honest – lacking balance, grip, two opposites from FP1 to FP2, and both of them are not very good, so from our side a lot of work to be done to also understand why we’re having these kinds of big problems at the moment. Not a good day.
“You just try to correct one thing and you get another one, but never finding a good balance basically.”
Asked to elaborate on whether he has ideas around what the team should focus on, Verstappen added: “Yeah, but at the same time it’s very difficult to solve at the moment, so I don’t expect miracles overnight. We just need to understand our issues a bit more, where they are coming from.”
While Verstappen was able to break into the top 10 in both sessions on Friday – finishing seventh and 10th respectively – Hadjar couldn’t quite match his pace, with the pair fighting frequent snaps of oversteer that saw them scrambling to stay on the track.
The team’s chief engineer, Paul Monaghan, explained that their performance currently doesn’t match “the standards we set ourselves”, but they have clear improvements to make ahead of FP3 and the all-important Qualifying hour.
“We’ve identified some things that are wrong which is nice because we’ve got a chance to correct it,” he said. “Now the question is how to correct it, so we’re busy bees looking at that.
“In essence, the car is what it is. Now can we figure out what’s gone wrong, understand it, fix it and hide it from everybody and drive out the door and be fast tomorrow? It’s a little challenge for us.”
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